Bizspace Spotlight

From left, Chan Sin Wong, president of Han Feng, with her husband, Zhou Min Ni, CEO of… more

Katie Arcieri

In the late 1980s, Chan Sin Wong immigrated from Hong Kong to Philadelphia with her mother and siblings to start a new life in the United States.

They joined Wong’s father, who arrived in Philadelphia a few years earlier to establish a Chinese restaurant and later a laundromat. As a teenager, Wong spent long hours at her father’s businesses, working the cash register and taking customer orders.

From left, Chan Sin Wong, president of Han Feng, with her husband, Zhou Min Ni, CEO of… more

Katie Arcieri

“When we got out of school around 3:30 or 4, we would help my dad for three hours,” Wong says. Then it was homework, sleep and back to school the next morning.

The work ethic instilled in Wong at a young age has no doubt played a key role in helping her build Han Feng Inc., a Greensboro company that has become one of the largest distributors of food products and supplies to Chinese restaurants across the Southeast.

Officials with Han Feng said their 160,000-square-foot former Guilford Mills building at 6001 West Market Street employs a staff of 150 workers, generates $150 million in annual sales and distributes products such as fortune cookies, tofu, soy sauce, poultry, vegetables and other items to approximately 1,500 Chinese restaurant customers.

Han Feng’s Greensboro operation is part of a much larger group of affiliate companies that collectively employ about 800 workers at distribution facilities across the country.

Wong and Zhou Min Ni, her husband and business partner, both got their start in the United States by working in Chinese restaurants. Wong said Zhou Min Ni was only 18 or 19 when he immigrated to America from China and began working for his uncle’s restaurant business in New Jersey. The couple — who met through an introduction by Wong’s father — began their approximately four-year courtship. “He was still working for the restaurant; I was helping my parents with the laundromat,” Wong said. “We (would) maybe go out twice a week.” Wong said they wed in New Jersey in September 1992 and have been happily married ever since.

Newly married and needing to provide for themselves, the couple decided to start a business venture, partly out of necessity.

When Wong married Zhou Min Ni, she didn’t have a job. And her husband had a desire to start his own business.

“We needed to try it,”she said. “It’s working or not working. The only thing in our mind was working hard.”

The couple decided that starting a venture in the South would make the most sense because it was a less expensive place to do business and offered a chance to live in a warmer climate without the congestion that comes with the densely populated areas of Philadelphia and New Jersey. She also said that at the time there was less competition in the South for Chinese restaurants than in places such as New York City. “Fifteen years later, there’s a whole bunch more,”she said.

Wong said her husband first tested the market by starting a take-out restaurant business in Virginia. But he quickly found it difficult to get Chinese food products needed by the operation from the nearest distributor, located across the border in North Carolina.

“He needed to call to New York or New Jersey to bring the pallets of product to Virginia,”she said. Drawing on that experience, Wong and Zhou Min Ni decided to open their own Chinese food distribution center in North Carolina.

Wong said she and her husband did not know much about the Tar Heel state at the time, but that Zhou Min Ni pulled out a map and drove to the Triad, with its central location and good road network, on a chance.

Kernersville landlord George Page remembers the day that Zhou Min Ni stopped by his office, which was on North Cherry Street at the time. “It was Min and two or three other guys,” he said. “I was able to show them several spaces.” One of those spaces fit the company’s needs perfectly — an approximately 53,000-square-foot building at 745 Cinema Court that offered room for growth. Wong said she and her husband started their food distribution business in a 3,000-square-foot space at the building with fewer than 10 employees. The company was only serving about 10 restaurants at the time, but each week it gained new orders from customers while also generating leads.

As business grew, the company would take over any open vacancy within the Cinema Court building, until it occupied the majority of the facility, Page said.

Wanting to expand, the company rented a nearby 30,000 square-foot location at Triad Warehouse in Kernersville “because they had a big freezer over there and a big cooler,” Wong said. But even with a second location, the “space was completely too small.”

Seeking a much larger location, Wong looked to Greensboro, where there was a greater inventory of warehouse buildings. The company was interested in locating at the former Guilford Mills facility, but didn’t have enough credit to purchase the building at the time, Wong said. That’s when she asked Page for help. “I asked him, “could you help me buy the property?” ” she said.

Page said he wanted to help the company because he already had a “good working relationship” with them. To do that, he formed a business entity called J&J Acquisition Corp. — named after his former wife Jane and Wong, who also goes by “Joann” — that bought the Guilford Mills facility and in late 2002 sold the building to a business entity affiliated with Wong called R&N Holdings LLC for $3.3 million, according to property records.

Katie Arcieri covers manufacturing, aviation and economic development for Triad Business Journal. Contact her at 336-370-2913.